Embrace Angels
Date: 28- 31 October 2026
Time: 13.00-19.00
Location: NU Building, De Boelelaan 1111 Amsterdam
Een kunstwerk van Karen Lancel en Hermen Maat.
Dit interactieve kunstwerk bestaat uit een 9 meter catwalk, twee Franka robot armen en een conversational robot.
Wat kun je meemaken?
Podcast
Hybrid Society is a provocative podcast exploring the uneasy co‑evolution of humans and artificial intelligence.
Hosted by Joshiya Mitsunaga, with co‑hosts Prof. Catholijn Jonker (Professor of Interactive Intelligence at TU Delft) and Prof. Frank van Harmelen (Full Professor of Knowledge Representation & Reasoning, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), each episode unpacks the political, ethical, and philosophical tensions at the heart of smart technology.
About us
Hybrid Intelligence (HI) is the combination of human and machine intelligence, expanding human intellect instead of replacing it. HI takes human expertise and intentionality into account when making meaningful decisions and perform appropriate actions, together with ethical, legal and societal values. Our goal is to design Hybrid Intelligent systems, an approach to Artificial Intelligence that puts humans at the centre, changing the course of the ongoing AI revolution.
By providing intelligent artificial collaborators that interact with people we strengthen our human capacity for learning, reasoning, decision making and problem solving. This interaction has the potential to amplify both human and machine intelligence by combining their complementary strengths. Hybrid Intelligence requires meaningful interaction between artificial intelligent agents and humans to negotiate and align goals, intentions and implications of actions.
Developing HI needs fundamentally new solutions to core research problems in AI: current AI technology surpasses humans in many pattern recognition and machine learning tasks, it falls short on general world knowledge, common sense reasoning, and human capabilities such as collaboration, adaptivity, responsibility and explainability (CARE). These challenges are being addressed in four interconnected research lines:
Collaborative HI
How to design and build intelligent agents that work in synergy with humans, with awareness of each other’s strengths and limitations?
Adaptive HI
The world in which Hybrid Intelligent systems operate is dynamic, as are the teams of humans and agents that make up such HI systems.
Responsible HI
Addressing and mitigating some of the perceived risks of Artificial Intelligence technologies requires ethical and legal concerns to be an integral part of the design and operation of HI systems.
Explainable HI
Intelligent agents and humans need to be able to mutually explain to each other what is happening, what they want to achieve, and what collaborative ways they see of achieving their goals.
More detailed descriptions of our objectives and the original organisation into four interconnected research lines, our evaluation metrics and other information can be found in the public version of our proposal.
The Hybrid Intelligence Centre is a collaboration of top AI researchers from the VU Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam, the TU Delft, and the Universities of Groningen, Leiden, and Utrecht, in areas such as machine learning, knowledge representation, natural language understanding & generation, information retrieval, multi-agent systems, psychology, multimodal interaction, social robotics, AI & law and ethics of technology. The HI centre will create a national and international focus point for research on all aspects of Hybrid Intelligent systems.
From Artificial Intelligence to Hybrid Intelligence
Watch Prof. Dr. Catholijn Jonker’s talk recorded at the Royal Institution on October 24, 2023, for a clear and detailed explanation why HI is the way forward.
Best Paper Award & Blue Sky nomination for HI members at AAMAS 2026
Mireia Yurrita, Davide Dell’Anna, Pradeep Murukannaiah, Catholijn Jonker and Pinar Yolum won the Best Paper Award for their paper Developing Guidelines for Human-LLM Agent Teams: A Multi-Stakeholder Lens
In addition, Davide Dell’Anna and Pradeep K. Murukannaiah were also nominated for Best Blue Sky Paper for Guiding Sociotechnical Systems toward Value-Norm Equilibrium.
"We define hybrid intelligence (HI) as the combination of human and machine intelligence, augmenting human intellect and capabilities instead of replacing them and achieving goals that were unreachable by either humans or machines."
Z. Akata, D. Balliet, M. de Rijke, F. Dignum, V. Dignum, G. Eiben, A. Fokkens, D. Grossi, K. Hindriks, H. Hoos, H. Hung, C. Jonker, C. Monz, M. Neerincx, F. Oliehoek, H. Prakken, S. Schlobach, L. van der Gaag, F. van Harmelen, H. van Hoof, B. van Riemsdijk, A. van Wynsberghe, R. Verbrugge, B. Verheij, P. Vossen, and M. Welling, “A Research Agenda for Hybrid Intelligence: Augmenting Human Intellect With Collaborative, Adaptive, Responsible, and Explainable Artificial Intelligence,” IEEE Computer, vol. 53, iss. 08, pp. 18-28, 2020.
Location
The Hybrid Intelligence Centre is headquartered in the New University Building at the campus of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, with working locations at all participating universities in Amsterdam (VU & UvA), Delft, Groningen, Leiden and Utrecht.
The HI Centre will be a sustainable centre of excellence where researchers can meet, collaborate and use the shared laboratories and infrastructure, with a lasting impact on the research programmes of each of the participating universities. The Hybrid Intelligence Center is funded by a 10 year Zwaartekracht grant from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.
